Straight Talk on Self-Driving Cars

MADISON, Wis. -- Once Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) started to proliferate on the consumer automotive market, the media began to breathlessly anticipate a future of "self-driving cars." (This publication is no exception when we post a story like Can a Car Find a Parking Spot by Itself?)

The louder the buzz about autonomous driving, the more excited consumers are supposed to get. They might even accept its eventuality -- or so hope auto companies.

Well, not so fast.

There is a pretty visible gap between what ADAS is capable of doing today and how consumers envision the ultimate future of autonomous driving. The conversation on "self-driving cars" between automakers and consumers has barely begun.

It's important to note that engineering -- automotive, mobile phones, or consumer electronics in general -- is no longer just about what technologies can do. It's about how technologies convenience -- or sometimes unwittingly -- inconvenience people's lives. Consumers have been known to adjust their behavior to technologies, or "getting used to it," as the industry describes it. But don't believe for a minute that this is a given.

Many engineering issues today center on how technologies eventually emulate; mimic; and, if possible, understand people's actions, tastes, and emotions. Therein lies the challenge of the self-driving car.

Because a car is an everyday tool, the likely decisions made by self-driving cars must be deeply personal to most consumers. The essential design issue lies in anticipating what users might or might not do in advance. It's about knowing how a person behaves while driving.

In a recent interview with EE Times, Davide Santo, Freescale Semiconductor's safety and chassis segment manager, based in Munich, offered a no-nonsense straight talk on the future of self-driving cars. In his view, there are at least three high-level challenges, or "areas for investigation," that the automotive industry needs to work on before coming up with acceptable driverless cars:

Handover
The first challenge is about the "handover" from car to driver -- in terms of making decisions and knowing when to return the car to "manual" control, explained Santo.

There will be times, Santo explained, when the situation on the road gets too tricky for a driverless car to handle. But at a time when that "handover" decision, followed by an appropriate action, needs to be taken within a matter of seconds, how does the car know if a driver is paying attention to the road? Is the human driver aware of what's around his car at that very moment?

Sure, sensors inside the car can keep an eye on the driver and be ready to get his attention, and tell him there's a train/helicopter/six-car crash brewing at the intersection, so maybe he should grab the wheel and steer for the ditch. But this all needs to happen very quickly. How the car gives back control to a driver, how the driver accepts it, and how fast -- all while the car is tooling along at 55 -- is a scary challenge.

Branding
As much as the automotive industry is eager to offer driverless cars, blindly following the trend could unexpectedly risk the reputation of a brand.

Think about it, said Santo. "For a lot of drivers, cars aren't just about safety. They're also about the joy of driving." An automotive brand like BMW, which billed itself as "The Ultimate Driving Machine," is now offering drivers, in its promotions, "Sheer Driving Pleasure." But if a driver loves driving his BMW, how does BMW enable him to express that love in a driverless BMW that doesn't let him drive?

Safety should certainly come first. But after all, people choose a car with a certain brand because they think the brand speaks to them. So, how carmakers incorporate that personality in driverless cars is an interesting quandary.

Personalization
Cars will adapt "actively" to drivers, according to Santo. Santo said during his EET interview: "Why shouldn't my car speak with an Italian accent? The car will know that I speak English with an Italian accent, and the car can and should adapt to it when it speaks to me." That little idiosyncrasy could easily put a driver in a much more relaxed mood, Santo added.

The Google cars are driving around every day continually making the universe of unknowns smaller. If they double their current miles, they'll have demonstrated that they're safer than the average driver. Without changing the infrastructure.

The Google car can tell whether the light is red or green. Emergency vehicles cause the light to change. It seems like a self-driving vehicle handle, say, a cop car running a red light as well or better than a person can. The Google cars have over 500,000 miles on public roads with no accidents. They're getting better every day.

Along those lines, when I drove by a google "self driving" car, I really wanted to go in front of it and slam on my brakes to see if it would stop in time. Am I the only one who wants some personal data acquisition?

I would certainly rather work on my laptop during my commute (1 hour each way) than worry about driving. On the other hand, I do like listening to my audio books. But the biggest snarls in traffic are often from some stupid fender bender (or worse) and if self driving cars can do nothing other than keep space between the front of the car (i.e. stop and/or speed up), this could be a good thing. Would definitely take some getting used to...

Good point indeed Olaf. I think this technology is coming at the wrong time in history when nations are broke to do any major project financing. Pot holes and bad bridges, I wish Google and the likes good luck if they expect govt to help make this mainstream.

Some of the scenarios you described in your post perfectly capture the real-word's needs for autonomous driving. I feel for your father. And yes, we all need someday a car that can get us to where we need to be.

Meanwhile, if not a complete self driving, we do understand the need for semi-autonomous driving. For safety, it's indeed a great help.

And yet, what is not so clear to me is to get a handle on when and where my judgement is required while driving vs when and where I can totally trust my car to do the job.

Self driving cars will come in the not so distant future, no doubt. We have already seen prototypes, which find a parking lot by themselves. We have adaptive cruise control, which is based on radar and we have lane departure warning and blind spot detection based on cameras and image processing already since a few years. The step towards (semi-) autonomous driving in stop and go traffic up to a certain speed is not a big one. Gradual improvements will finally bring the autonomous car, which drives at higher speeds and passes slower traffic. No need for changes in the infrastructure, all done by optics, radar and processing power. After all, who would fund such an infrastructure? Maybe Asia, but the western countries are on a decline, all of them. They don't even have the money to maintain the current infrastructure (e.g. bridges).Who needs (semi) autonomous cars? Well, we all may need them when we get older and become handicapped in one way or another. Remember that, also in the western world, many people live in rural areas without much public transportation. My father suffered from a stroke earlier this year and he had to give up driving. With his children living far away, it is difficult for him to get to the doctor, who is a mere 5 miles away. When I'm in his age, I will enter the car and tell it to bring me to the doctor. It doesn't have to be fast and driving needs not be fun, but it will eventually get me there. And regarding the fun side of driving, there are enough situations, in which driving is no fun. A six hours ride leaves enough opportunities to lay back a while for a break or to drive manually with enthusiasm. Just like on a cross-country flight in a small aircraft, where even the passionate pilot leaves flying to the autopilot.

I think we are overly simplifying the dynamics associated with our central nervous system. The human brain with its association of sensors spanning our entire body is one mechanical system that is very hard to model and control. There are just too many degrees of freedom. If we confine the control problem to a restricted, well defined or well-known domain with a small finite number of unknowns, then it becomes increasingly realistic to design a control system to work within the boundaries.

This is what most control systems are about today. They have several output variables which they attempt to keep within a control limit. This is possible with combat aircraft, submarines and many other advanced control solutions we have developed. However, in all of these cases, you still need that human factor to account for the unknown.

Self-driving cars will be operating in a uncontrolled environment with a lot of unknowns. This alone makes it a very difficult proposition. Like someone mentioned, we are barely doing a good job in maintaining our relatively primitive transportation infrastructure. How will we fare with such a highly intelligent and advanced traffic infrastructure? We are automating certain tasks in cars today but at the end of the day, we still need that human factor to cater for the unknown.

A similar argument can be applied to robots. There has been significant progress made in this field but there is still a long way to go before a robot can undertake a sample portion of the tasks we are capable of. It must also be said that some emotional or irrational human decisions could sometimes end up being the appropriate ones based on the context, something which is impossible to automate.